October 21, 2014 Named for one of the world’s most riven  cities, the Jerusalem String Quartet modeled  near-perfect concord in works by Beethoven,  Bartók and Ravel, Oct. 19 for the San Antonio  Chamber Music Society. The performance in  Temple Beth-El was remarkable for the  musicians’ unity of timing and timbre, and  also for their restraint in all matters except  sonic  gorgeousness.  The players were violinists Alexander  Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam  and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov. Mr. Kam joined in  2011. The others founded the quartet (with  violist Amihai Grosz) while they were  students at the Jerusalem Conservatory of  Music and Dance.  Their cerebral approach required the listener  to lean forward and listen patiently. Feverish,  throat-grabbing intensity was not the  Jerusalem’s game. The music revealed itself in  sighs and whispers. Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2 was a particularly  intriguing case in point. Bartók composed the work between  1915 and 1917, during the bloodbath known at the time as  The Great War. Some interpreters hear a reaction to the war  in the opening movement’s violent dissonances and in the  finale’s desolation. The breakdown of traditional tonality is  certainly apparent in the the work’s harmonic idiom, which  borrows from both of the period’s major insurgencies  —  Debussy’s whole-tone scale and early Schoenberg’s extreme  chromaticism.  In the Jerusalem’s performance, Bartók’s harmonies  sounded less dissonant than luxuriant. The heat was muted,  the violence distant. The first movement seemed too  abstract, too poised at times, yet it gained a cumulative  power that might elude more-aggressive performances.  A  strong sense of line unified the middle movement’s frenetic  shifts, and Mr. Pavlovsky took Bartók’s “molto capriccioso”  indication at face value. In the finale, the quartet’s taut  control and carefully balanced chordings served to heighten  the tension and the sense of loss in the music.  The Jerusalem opened the concert with Beethoven’s Quartet in A, Op. 18, No. 5, from the set of six that were the composer’s first essays in the string quartet genre. All six were planted firmly in the classicism of Haydn and Mozart — No. 5 especially so. The performance was classically calm and creamy, but the players also were attentive to the music’s peculiarly Beethovenian gestures, which were played more emphatically.  Ravel’s Quartet in F benefited from the Jerusalem’s superb sense of direction, exquisite refinement (at the cost of some damping of the second movement’s crackling energy) and generosity of tone.  Mike Greenberg    

Bartók

respond

Jerusalem String Quartet

Revelations in sighs and whispers

Jerusalem String Quartet: Kyril Zlotnikov, Alexander Pavlovsky, Ori Kam, Sergei BreslerPhoto: Felix Broede  

incident light

music